The village was in ruins. It reminded Sango unpleasantly of her own village, or how her own village must have looked before Inuyasha and his friends cleaned it up and gave all of the villagers a proper burial. There was no one to bury the villagers here. The bodies lay where they had fallen. The stench of death was strong enough that Sango could smell it long before she and Miroku caught up with their companions, but the bodies had not yet begun to rot. Whatever had happened here had been very recent. So recent, in fact, that Sango wondered if the perpetrator had had time to flee, or if there might not be someone left alive somewhere in the village.

But even a quick look around the village told her that they had no hope of finding survivors.

As she and the monk caught up to Inuyasha and Kagome, Sango made sure to stick close to the other girl. There were no survivors, as far as she could tell, but whoever had done this might still be around. Sango could defend herself in close quarters, but she wasn't so sure about Kagome.

"Do you think we'll find any survivors?" Kagome asked in a hushed voice.

Sango hesitated for a moment before deciding to answer truthfully. "No. Judging by the condition this place is in… It looks like everyone's been killed."

"How awful," Kagome breathed.

Sango wondered if this was what it had been like for Kagome, Inuyasha, and Miroku when they entered the village of the Taijiya. Only in that case, it had been Naraku's horde of youkai that had done the killing. These villagers had been slain by weapons. Human weapons, from the look of it. But when Sango knelt to get a closer look, it seemed to her as if the wounds had not been created by swords, but rather by something with a curved blade.

Too late she realized that Miroku had come over to see what she was investigating. "It looks like they were all felled by a single blow," he murmured. She wondered if he was seeking her opinion. "It would take a master swordsman to do this."

"These wounds were not made by a sword," she told him quietly. It should have been obvious from the lack of slashing cuts. All of the injuries were deep punctures. In fact, they reminded her of nothing more than the wounds inflicted by a chain scythe like the one her brother had used. The wounds she had borne and somehow survived.

The scar on her back throbbed unpleasantly.

"But if they're not sword-cuts, who could have done this?" Kagome asked.

No one had an answer for her.

Sango glanced to the side, hoping against hope for some sort of clue as to who might be responsible for the slaughter. Identifying the weapon that created the victims' injuries was easy compared to figuring out who had done the deed. She could try to find the killer's path out of the village, but there were so many trails and footprints to begin with that it was difficult to tell what had happened leading up to the chaos and destruction. Unless, it occurred to her, they could use Inuyasha's nose to track the killer.

It seemed that the same idea had occurred to Inuyasha himself moments before. His face had screwed up as he sniffed the air. "Why don't we ask the guy hiding over here?" he asked. In one swift motion he drew his sword and slashed open one of the nearby huts.

At first nothing happened. Sango and Miroku braced themselves for a fight, ready to defend themselves and Kagome.

And then a chain scythe lashed out of the darkness of the hut, a chain scythe identical to the one her brother had used before his death. Sango's heart pounded fiercely in her chest. Had someone stolen the weapon from her brother's grave? Whoever it was, she was determined to have her revenge.

Inuyasha knocked the chain scythe out of the way effortlessly, but it was too late. The perpetrator could no longer risk hiding in the shadows. Sango got a clear look at him in the instant before he took off running for the forest. In that instant, she felt her heart stop beating.

He was slight and small, lithe and quick, and he wore the uniform of a Taijiya warrior, with his hair pulled up into a tail at the back of his head. A mask covered the lower half of his face, but she didn't need to see his face to recognize her dead brother.

Kohaku!